UNIFIED Enterprise Content Management

Before I tackle this blog posting I’m going to come clean.  I was an Obama supporter, I am an Obama supporter and I hope I never see a day that I can’t support him.  Nevertheless, if we’re moving toward a uniform EHR system in this country as he has clearly indicated, I think it’s high time we asked some tough questions about how all this would work and whose going to get the contract. 

Let’s just say what we already know, that the completely “paperless office” that many companies sell is a hook line and sinker sales pitch that rarely rings true.  Mr. President, if you say jump, I’ll say how high, but you can’t just come out and say matter of factly, “just put it all online.”  It’s not that easy, Mr. President.  A lot of these doctors out there, they can cure but they can’t compute and we can’t punish them if they don’t go electronic.  Your plan is so ambitious, which is what I like so much about you, but I just don’t see that as the right solution.  I mean, you don’t have to set out a vision for how you think people should handle medical records.  This is already happening as fast as it can.  Trust me when I say that the private sector is better at guaging consumer interest and developing product and it should be left to the private sector.

To be fair, the President hasn’t laid out his exact vision of what a nationwide electronic health records system would look like, but if they’re all supposed to work together, are we going to be getting an EHR Czar any time soon?  Because somebody’s going to have to take the profit and the blame for that if it runs over budget and fails.

I can’t help but wonder how the software industry will benefit or suffer as a result of standardizing an industry whose innovations are inextricably linked to the competition among its many great players.

The United States already has defined standards which electronic document management companies must meet in order to secure government contracts.   We know that the National Archives does a tremendous job of preserving not only some of the nation’s most important records, but delivering a whale of daily requests without complaint.  Indeed, there are many successful deployments of records management software and the great majority of the most sophisticated gems of our Defense Department have been built by private contractors.

Putting aside the serious security concerns and undoubtebly the mess that a new HIPAA amendment will create, a more interesting question here is that if somehow the Congress is pursuaded to look beyond even privacy and cost issues and manages to pass and implement a countrywide electronic health records system… exactly what will that look like, Mr. President?   When you think about it, it’s kind of a socialist concept because you have to explain what happens to all EHR companies that are already servicing the Health Industry. 

Has this Administration ordered a very serious, and not just birds eye view, analysis of the actual difficulty and cost of taking apart hundreds of thousands of existing data models and integrating them?  Has anybody in the Administration considered what a complicated and time consuming process it would be to convert and process the billions of records into one uniform system?

In the interest of full disclosure, I admit I am a part of the Information Management community, whose proprietors take on many tasks from library science to analytics and data modeling.  I do recognize the great benefits that a nationwide electronic health record system can bring, even the possibility of saving lives.  It’s clear that basic proof of this kind of system already exists in the law enforcement community, where interoperability of records systems have given officers the tools to stop crime and identify perps before they strike.  However, this system has been built by a myriad of different companies, specializing in all types of software applications, and have worked very well with each other up until this point. 

I can’t quite say with any certainty that replacing the “patchwork” style law enforcement records system with a government run one would cut the crime rate.   If anything it might cause more complications than were even expected when originally designed.   All that said, I do wish the President the best of luck, I do not want him to fail, and I pray that he find the best minds he can before embarking on this “Mother of All Conversions.”